The Secret of the Rose and Glove (4 page)

This night was not named for the Pallid Princess, Urgathoa, although it was said that she relished it. Nor was it so named for the fearful faces of the living who huddled indoors and made a show of merriment, lest they encounter the spirits of the previous year’s dead. Rather it was named for a simple thing, the pole or piling which marked the boundary of a temple yard. For on this night only a fool or one with some fell errand would venture beyond the pale.

Norret was not certain which applied to him—probably both—but he had left the outmost gatepost of the beer garden of the Transfixed Chanticleer half a mile behind, stumping along with his crutch through the snow, having committed he didn’t know how many sacrileges against the tavern’s patron god, Cayden Cailean.

The first had been staying sober. The third had been volunteering to tend bar, and in the guise of getting a bottle of rare liqueur from the top shelf, taking down the shining ormolu form of Coco the cockatrice and slipping it into his soldier’s pack. The second? Lutin, the tavern cat, was also fond of the top shelf, sleeping in front of the cross-stitch sampler that composed the Accidental God’s shrine. Norret had sprinkled an alchemical preparation of powdered herring scales over him, camouflaging the cat as Coco.

Norret hoped that Lutin would continue to sleep, or at least that the devotees of the Drunken Hero would write off the sight of an impaled gilded meowing cockatrice as an ecstatic vision from the god himself.

The Night of the Pale was clear and freezing, lit only by the stars and Norret’s bullseye lantern. He quaffed an extract of coltsfoot, giving himself the endurance of a horse and some of its surefootedness to offset his limping, and at last arrived back at the Liberty Hostel.

Sulfurous steam curled from the unfrozen end of reflecting pool as Patapouf the unicorn stood over its wellspring, glaring at Norret accusingly as if he were the one responsible for the creature’s missing horn.

Norret sighed, leaned his crutch against the carriage porch, and unlaced his boots. If the worst horror the Night of the Pale held was wet feet, he would be a lucky man.

He unstopped a flask, applying a drop of viscous golden fluid to the thick end of the alicorn, taking a moment to open another phial and slick the stopper with an unguent of goose grease and eel liver before replacing it. He had heard the Katapeshi alchemists used the peels of some yellow Mwangi fruit to the same effect with a more pleasant scent, but an alchemist in Galt couldn’t hope for imports.

Norret then stepped into the pool. The water barely covered his calves but the warmth made his half-frozen feet feel like knives were being applied. It had been years since he had done this, a frightened boy with a rose and a simple wish, whereas he was now a crippled man with a complicated one. Yet like a rose, the complications were simple when you thought of them: After a great deal of research and revelation, Norret had realized that the interconnected baths and fountains of the Liberty Hostel formed a giant water clock, and while it might be possible to jury-rig some means to open any hidden chambers, that would be like sticking a fork in a broken Brastlewark timepiece hoping the bat would fly out the belfry while the little wooden devils came out to do the dance of the hours. But if one could obtain the original parts….

Before the glue set, Norret lifted Coco the cockatrice—who the sculptor had actually skewered above tail, not beneath, though with the way it twisted around the spiraled unicorn horn, this was not immediately obvious—and fit Patapouf’s horn back into its empty socket.

The unicorn said nothing. No thanks for the return of his alicorn or complaints about the still missing carbuncle.

Norret stood there for a long minute, freezing and frozen, looking at the statue, repaired but useless.

Then Coco’s beak opened:

No chicken laid this royal egg.

What hand shall hatch it now, I beg?

Norret stood stock still for another minute, unmoving, as if the cockatrice had petrified him. Coco repeated his rhyme. Norret nodded, then hobbled his way back to the icy lip of the reflecting pool. He took out his formulary and used a lead stylus to write down Coco’s verse, then got his feet out of the pool, slipping and rolling through a snowdrift until he collected his crutch and his boots, stuffing his wet feet inside before they could freeze to the ice. Teeth chattering, he gathered his lantern and staggered inside the Liberty Hostel. The sad fact was that he feared his own countrymen more than he feared the unknown horrors of the Night of the Pale, and this was the only night he was likely to have the chateau to himself.

Despite its haunted reputation—the lights in the corridors, the whispers from inside the walls, the unfortunate deaths and unexplained disappearances—the duchess’s former chateau had a number of permanent residents, and Norret was only one. Another had been Rhodel.

As was the custom, any room was free to any guest to stay in as long as he liked so long as he worked for the good of the household. Rhodel had chosen the duchess’s boudoir, and since no one else had stepped forward to claim it after the old dollymop’s flamboyant death, it was now Norret’s.

So were its heated floors, and as much as his countrymen might decry the late duke’s extravagant remodeling, at the moment Norret thought the geothermal piping beneath the tiles was worth every last copper. He stripped off his damp boots and snow-dusted clothes and left them steaming on the floor.

As for the rest of the chamber, Rhodel had turned it into a fantastic magpie’s nest of oddments scavenged from about the chateau: here a scrap of tapestry, there a swag of lace. A mangy hobby horse sized for a halfling or a human child lay propped in one corner, button eyes staring sadly, and beside that stood a changing maiden, a curious appurtenance that resembled a mad wizard’s golem more than a furnishing one might expect to see in a noblewoman’s dressing room. On the bottom was an unremarkable three-legged round table, but a pillar spiraled from the center with two arms, one holding a mirror, the other a tray, and at the top was the head of a beautiful, if bald, woman.

This one appeared to be ebonized wood, but appearances could be deceiving. Norret had quickly recognized the black as silver sulfide—or more prosaically, tarnish. Of course, if it were pure silver, the maiden would have been smelted for coins years ago, but scratches in the wash revealed the galena gray of poor-quality pewter. Like the pinchbeck and paste jewels once favored by the nobility when traveling, the odd vanity-cum-wig-stand was nothing more than gaudy trash meant to be stolen by highwaymen or dim-witted monsters.

Even so, she still proved useful. The maiden’s tray worked as a fireproof stand for Norret’s lantern while her mirror acted as an excellent reflector, providing both light and additional heat, for the Night of the Pale was as dark and cold as Zon-Kuthon’s heart.

Far more valuable than the maiden but even less saleable in current-day Galt was the grand bed where Norret now crawled between the worn duvets and decaying featherbeds. Carved of costly Qadiran rosewood, the decorations depicted some unfamiliar eastern legend involving courtiers and concubines with pipes chasing a gold dragon through fields filled with poppies, at last coming to a poppy-themed palace where they smoked more pipes as the good dragon imparted his wisdom. Norret’s only dealings with dragons to date, thankfully, had been the draconic system of alchemy favored by Powdermaster Davin. While that dealt with the cruel chromatic dragons, it only did so in the metaphorical and symbolic sense, and there mostly only with the four—the green, the red, the blue, and the black—that corresponded with the four elements, the four humors, and the four seasons. The white was reserved for the quintessence. Metallic dragons were more of a mystery, and while Norret suspected the bed’s carvings depicted some alchemical metaphor from Tian Xia, it could just as easily be a historical record of the great gold dragon Mengkare and the founding of the fabled nation of Hermea.

Regardless, it was also the place where Rhodel had plied her trade for the past forty years. Norret had of course rummaged beneath the mattress for anything of value, finding a small stash of silver and a large cache of negligees, but after imbibing Cedrine’s decoction of fern seeds, his attention had focused on the carvings. One of the pipes in a courtier’s hand could be pushed in like a peg. One of the concubine’s bound feet could be twisted like a knob. And once Norret had moved both of those, he impulsively tweaked the sun disk at the tip of the dragon’s tail.

Like a gnome puzzle box, the hidden panel in the headboard slid aside, revealing its treasure: a book.

“It seems that Rhodel was telling the truth all along.”

It had not been, as he had hoped, Duchess Devore’s alchemical formulary, or even that of her late husband, but it was something hidden since the Revolution, and a final present from old Rhodel.

Norret opened the panel again on this, the coldest and darkest of nights, retrieving the book, and reread the title: The Alchymical Wedding: A Masque of Allegory. And below that, in grandiose script: By Darl Jubannich.

The Revolution’s poet and co-instigator had even signed the manuscript with a signature even larger and more vainglorious than the typeface, and added a personal dedication: For Rhodel, our little Horse.

Norret had read it cover to cover. It was a masque of the sort no longer seen in Galt but still beloved by Shelyn, a grand flowering of art and science, artifice and architecture, and no little wit. It was also a piece of contraband which could send anyone to the guillotine, for rather than the chromatic dragons favored by Powdermaster Davin, or the poetic tree of birds of Katapeshi alchemy, or the mountain of the philosophers or whatever exotic metaphor the alchemists used in Tian Xia, the manuscript referred to the philosopher’s quest and the alchemist’s great work by means of the worst possible metaphor in post-revolutionary Galt: a royal wedding.

The masque’s plot was relatively simple: The youngest daughter of the King of the Moon—symbolic of silver and womanhood and played by Anais Peperelle-née-Devore—had come to wed the Golden Youth, the son of the Golden Sovereign, the Sun King, both symbolic of gold and manhood and both played by the elderly Duke Arjan Devore, using a magic hat to make the former role credible. Assorted ambassadors and emissaries of the planets and elements arrive, bringing with them nuptial gifts of alchemical significance, each more fantastic and valuable than the last, until at last the Silver Maiden and Golden Youth exchange betrothal gifts, the Carbuncle and the Crapaudine, the fabled ruby and diamond periapts of House Devore—the Carbuncle returning after centuries as part of Anais’s dowry, as the Peperelles were not old nobility but a family of wealthy spice merchants who had managed to obtain the stone in Taldor, using it as the sovereign glue to cement a splendid match for their brilliant young daughter.

Just when the treasures could not get more ostentatious, the Golden Sovereign reveals his own gift for the happy couple: the philosopher’s stone, the jewel in the crown of the royal art and the substance which could not only transmute lead to gold and resurrect the dead, but could also restore the aged to youth.

At this point the Golden Youth removes his disguise, revealing that he and the Golden Sovereign are one and the same, and confessing the other sad fact: his philosopher’s stone is broken and useless without the Silver Maiden’s aid.

Here alchemical metaphor began to cross into alchemical fact, for as amazing as the fabled artifact was, it shared the flaw of the least extract of the alchemist’s art: when exposed to air, the philosophic mercury in its center quickly decayed, and quickly tarnished into uselessness. This had occurred with the Golden Sovereign’s broken stone.

However, useless does not mean worthless, and an artifact is not so easily destroyed. Just as tarnish can be turned back into silver with the application of a bath of soda ash and foil of a lesser metal—the alchemical reaction to remove sulfur from silver—Duke Arjan Devore hoped, with the help of his clever young bride and the purifying radiance of the toad stone and the unicorn’s jewel, to discover a process to separate the philosophic mercury from the philosophic sulfur, thus recreating the White and Red Elixirs, the penultimate stages of the great work.

At this point alchemical theory moved back to poetic metaphor and the conventions of the theater: The White Queen and the Red King combined, singing a particularly passionate duet, then merged into the Divine Hermaphrodite and gave birth to their magical child, the Golden Heir. For the masque’s finale, all the wedding guests reappeared, ascending the mount of the alchemists to attend the christening, singing the praises of the heir who was one and the same with the philosopher’s stone, and also praising the proud parents, the King and Queen, not only separate once again but both now blessed with the glory of eternal youth for achieving the alchemist’s quest, and even the birds in the tree of knowledge at the summit joined in the song.

That was the theory, at least. In reality, Duke Arjan died of old age and his bride ended up fleeing a revolution.

Of course, very few lives go according to plan. Norret paged back through the book to the part where Aballon, the Horse, fastest of the planets and symbolic of quicksilver, sends the youngest filly from his herd as both herald and wedding gift, there to act as page and messenger in the happy couple’s hall. Rather than being played by the child of some nobleman or other powerful friend, this part was given to the daughter of the duke’s stable master, a remarkably pretty child with her hair braided with ribbons, a happy smile on her face, a hobby horse in one hand, and dreams of one day being a great bard or entertainer.

It had taken Norret almost a minute of staring at the hand-tinted etching to realize he was looking at Rhodel, ten years before the Revolution. Ten years before she had slept with the revolutionaries who came for her former mistress and every soldier since, taking up a rather different form of entertainment than she had originally planned, successfully saving her neck, if not her dignity.